Nina Lola Bachhuber: ‘The creative process is like a virus in my brain’
By Caroline Menezes

Nina Lola Bachhuber is an artist who seeks the unexpected in her daily routine and transforms what she finds into even more unpredictable art pieces. Working with drawings and sculptures, she creates different approaches to the same theme using the contrasting nature of the material she applies. Her ideas are based on her own inner world, populated by invented characters in strange scenarios that raise questions about the female body, passionate actions and freedom of movement. From tangible and identifiable elements, such as human limbs, mirrors or adornments, the artist conceives a fantastic universe with voodoo-like objects, animalistic organisms or mechanical figures. / Read more

The first thing one notes about Nina Lola Bachhuber’s sculptures and drawings is how rigorously conceived and rendered they are, how precise, and how acutely focused on formal matters of materials, shape, volume, surface, texture, and color. While Bachhuber juxtaposes multiple and at times jarring materials, like fabric, wigs, cast bones, mirrors, furniture, metal, and styrofoam, she does so with an aura of ultra-control, suggesting that she is not only an heir to Minimalist austerities, but also a young artist uncommonly interested in sculptural expertise altogether. / Read more

The fantastic, rather than the comic, is the register under which Nina Lola Bachhuber’s drawings of monochromatic figures (whether in blue or red ink) are transformed. In this exhibition, there are four very different such series in order to evidence the breath of her interests. Her figures-who seem to mock the interface between abstraction and figuration-come to us as true mutations of beings, regardless of their nature (some are biomorphic-gothic, others geometric-with a certain air of the figurines used in constructivist theater-, and still others, as in the case of her calaveras (skulls), are mythical and surreal). / Read more

On Nina Lola Bachhuber’s Untitled, 2010 (excerpt from the text “What is left”)
By Rachel Gugelberger

With a keen eye for modes of display, Nina Lola Bachhuber combines the formal language of surrealist sculpture with post-minimalist tendencies. Her curious, pseudo-mythological creatures are adorned with an array of decorative elements — hair, beads, nylons, leather — arranged in a manner that heightens the tension and confusion between their intended use and their enigmatic presentation. Bachhuber reconstructs her materials into seemingly ceremonial or devotional objects that revel in a realm of fetishistic obsession that is both playful and sinister. Here, for example, a viewer may see three bewigged skulls transformed into monopodic homunculi displayed on a modernist coffee table, the surface of which is composed of a meticulously hand-drawn pattern of geometric design. Invoking a menacing version of the Three Graces or even a collection of memento mori, Bachhuber’s tableau puts forth a multiplicity of speculative possibilities.

Nina Lola Bachhuber’s figurative and abstract drawings convey narratives of an unbridled psyche in a nocturnal state. Bachhuber frequently draws monochromatic images in red or blue ink or pencil, each with a loose quality lacking in self-consciousness, as if done in a reverie. Her work often consists of unsettling biomorphic images-overdeveloped “lodgings” and “receptacles”-as she calls them, giving the work a surrealist feel. / Read more

Moving fluidly between the realms of figuration and abstraction, often within a single drawing, Nina Lola Bachhuber attempts to describe the shifting inner landscape of human consciousness. Bachhuber has described the human body as “ a kind of lodging”, which under certain conditions may assume the imprisoning qualities of a cage. Her ink and pencil drawings explore these and other metaphors of the corpus (often an explicitly female one) through recurring imagery that includes helmets, receptacles, architectural fragments, and blood-red biomorphic forms. / Read more